"A
work of art is full of perhapses and maybesos. Where
the perhapses are found, something has to be done about it. And
since art deals wtih the perhapses and maybesos, and why not call it
the consummate science...which gets its perfection from seemingly
imperfection."

- John
Marin

John Marin was born in
1870 in Rutherford, New Jersey, and died at his home in Cape Split,
Maine in 1953.

From the
Bridge, 1931.
Watercolor and crayon on paper. Private collection.

Michael Maglaras’s third film about American Modernism is John
Marin: Let the Paint Be Paint! Using more than 70
watercolors, oils paintings, drawings, and etchings by the American
master John Marin, Michael Maglaras takes us on a journey from
Marin’s first representational work as an architectural student in
the 1890s, to the point, late in his life, when he pushes
representational painting to the very edge of Abstraction and
beyond. Let the Paint Be Paint! is an homage…but just
as importantly, it is the first documentary film made on the life of
this important American painter. For it is John Marin who is quite
rightly perceived and considered to be the father of Abstract
Expressionism. It’s a title he would not have accepted gladly… but
what’s clear is that Marin spent his entire life pushing the limits
of human expression and creating works of great joy and
communicative resonance. Drawing on archival sources to enhance his
narrative, as well as works from a number of national
collections…and most importantly from the private collections of
Marin family members…Michael Maglaras creates a permanent and
important statement on the importance of this supremely creative
American genius.

__________________________________

-
- Reflections by Michael
Maglaras

For some, moving from two films about Marsden Hartley to a film
about John Marin would seem a move in a different direction…maybe
even the wrong direction. Marsden Hartley’s devotees are that:
enthusiastic and, in some cases, fanatical lovers of Hartley’s work
and of what I will call the Hartley mystique. About John
Marin...some people have said they are puzzled about why I bothered
to make a film about an artist whose reputation isn’t what it used
to be.

For me, there is less difference between Marsden Hartley and John
Marin than meets the eye. Yes, they were both American Modernists.
Of course, they both came under the great influence and, to a large
extent, the patient sponsorship, of the remarkable Alfred Stieglitz.
It’s also true that they were both self-taught, and like all true
intellectual autodidacts were filled with ideas that came from a
combination of deep and transcendent personal experience and a
simple daily quiet commitment to self-improvement.

It’s also true that they both came of age in the last third of the
19th century. America was a different place then. There is ample
evidence that the America of Whitman’s final years was an America
filled with ambition, enthusiasm, urbanity, and a certain wonderful
“can-do” feeling…a feeling that permeated both the commercial world
as well as the world of arts and letters.

It’s true as well that John Marin was a late bloomer, as was
Marsden Hartley, and both spent some years in their early middle age
absorbing the European artistic and cultural experience and legacy. There
the paths diverge, however. Hartley would return to Europe again
and again. He was an absorber of styles and was the ultimate and consummate
observer of life. John Marin returned finally and forever to the United
States in 1910, and burst on the scene through the intervention of Stieglitz
as a fully committed artist. John Marin became a family man. He was a hunter
and fisherman as well, and enjoyed the outdoors in ways that Marsden Hartley
could only have imagined.

Hartley became a good, sometimes great writer. Marin liked to write
but felt the need to communicate in the simplest possible terms. He
may sometimes be puffed up with aphorisms, but underneath each
statement lies always the kernel of truth.

I make these comparisons between these two giants of American
painting for only one reason… and that is to highlight their slight
differences rather than their apparent similarities. It is also to
state what seems obvious to me: they were both original American
geniuses of the first order whose works breathe a very different
aesthetic…but send, ultimately, a very similar message to the
viewer.

Everywhere you look these days John Marin’s reputation has gone
into some sort of eclipse. Among certain hipsters he is the
Modernist who simply failed to perform. At the end of his life he
pushes Abstraction to its ultimate limits…and then disappoints the
intelligentsia by sticking a gaff-rigged schooner in the upper
right-hand corner of the canvas, as if to remind himself and us not
only of his roots, but of the importance of capturing things from
life. Things not imagined; but things really seen and felt. This is
why in some quarters he is undervalued. Some people really hate it
when a perfectly good painter is just having too good of a time…and
they especially hate the idea that the artist’s joy might actually
be palpable to the viewer.

Marin was prolific. He was what we would have called in today’s
vernacular a “monster”…someone who created each day with an
intensity, fervor, and quality not only difficult to imagine in
2009, but difficult by any stretch to replicate. In a very real
sense, making a movie about John Marin is infinitely harder than
making a movie about Marsden Hartley. Marin’s middle class existence
suited him fine and suited his gentle but penetrating art. There was
very little angst about Marin. He went out and did, and he did
miraculously and magnificently from about 1910 until his death in
1953. The works he created in watercolor and oil, as well as his
many etchings and drawings, command our continued respect and
admiration. They also represent something extraordinary: as true
Modernist works, they also hang consistently well on the wall. There
are people who find Marin an enormously uncomfortable painter
because of this. We want our early Modernists to make us uneasy, to
be outspoken, to be controversial, to inflict, perhaps, a little
pain on the eyes as well as the soul. Marin will have none of this.
He wants us to rejoice. He wants us to enjoy in the old-fashioned
sense of that word, which is to derive a simple and visceral
pleasure by looking at his stuff on the wall and understanding that
what you see is not only part of a larger vision, but part of a
larger whole…a perfect whole, embracing more than 50 years of
intensely luscious creative activity.

I’ve said in this film that John Marin is one of the most overtly
communicative artists I’ve studied. John Marin appeals to me and
appeals to many, I think, because of his deep need for and
passionate commitment to simple communication. He wants you to see;
he wants you to feel; he wants you to explore; and I think, most
importantly, John Marin wants you to connect with the outside and
visible world with an active, instinctual, and complete commitment.
He knows, somehow, that if you do this, you’ll be the better for it.